The Achievement Gap

Under the flickering light of an alien sun a handful of Protoss probes busy themselves about the endless, automated work of collecting crystalline minerals. Occasionally one of them, as if directed by some guiding intelligence, breaks off from the main group and targets a spot of nearby ground where monumental energies are expended to warp in technology from some faraway somewhere before returning to its primary job.

A handful of minutes pass, and already the first Zealot has boots on the ground and takes position just outside the main camp. He crackles with alien technology and surveys the domain that shall soon belong to him and his allies. His confidence is echoed in his stance, as if he has taken illicit but irrevocable ownership of the dust under his feet. As he oozes his dominion a second soldier quickly takes proud position at his side. They are the vanguard of an invasion force that shall sweep across the face of the planet.

Before long a Cybernetics Core is furiously preparing the troop Gateways to become Warp Gates, dramatically accelerating the rate at which an army can be amassed. The first Robotics Facility nears completion, while nearly 2 dozen probes work furiously to sustain the resources of the war machine. Again, one of these proud probes breaks off from the gathering congregation to lay claim to a second nearby resource rich patch of land. Grand plans for glorious expansion are at work on the face of this doomed world.

As the determined probe passes through the small contingent of soldiers, now five units strong and down a ramp it encounters a wall of Terran firepower, and is annihilated under an immediate rain of fiery ordinance. There is a beat of shock before the sense of panic sets in.

It’s all over a few moments later. After 9 minutes and 56 seconds, the Protoss are wiped clean from the Blistering Sands.

As I sit back in my office chair, having played the first of what will be two humiliating games of Starcraft 2 against forum member and arbiter of genocide, Tkyl, I am reminded again of the monumental gulf that so often exists between myself and others in games like this.

At least it didn’t come as a shock. I knew going in that Tkyl competed at an entirely different level. He is ranked within the complex systems of Battle.net as a Platinum player, which I imagine means that before each game alien slave girls adorn him with crimson robes and rub exotic oils with enticing aromas into his revered hands. Then, from a throne of energy, and fueled by the angry heart of a contained supernova, he dispatches his galactic vengeance.

I, on the other hand, once beat a couple of guys who had never played before.

It was humbling, of course, to realize that not for one second of either game did I pose even a cursory threat. If you require some kind of equivalent simile to have it make sense in your head, here are a few that feel accurate to me. It was like trying to dogfight an F-16 with an Ultralight and a slignshot. It was like an intramural football game between the Indianapolis Colts and a group of aging Peruvian sharecroppers. It was like trying to light a campfire by hurling the sun at it.

This is a not uncommon problem with competitive online games. Much as I may long to engage in a game like Demigod, Halo Reach or Team Fortress 2, even the most cursory effort to dip a toe into the multiplayer spaces reveals the hideous truth that a substantial population have, in my absence, dedicated themselves to the glory of the game in ways usually reserved for religious rituals. To attempt to breach their holy sanctums of online space is like trying to talk theology with the Pope by continuously referencing Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a Christ figure. Not only are you going to get beat, but you’re probably going to be asked to leave.

Even in the confines of an accepting community such as ours, where I can use my safe word with players like Tkyl, there is an unavoidable blow to the spirit and ego when you realize that your efforts have only made him sleepy and longing for bed. For even the well trained, much less the best, playing me in one of these games apparently has the same effect as drinking a cup of warm milk and cuddling under a blanket on the couch.

For fragile egos like mine, this is not a desired outcome.

The solution, one might suggest is to put in the time, dedication and effort to become better. There are optimized build orders, hierarchies of give and take between units, well practiced strategies, optimal moments in which to act, and there is no reason I should be competitive without endless practice. While the idea of this goes against some basic principles of how I play games, it is not a concept that I have never considered.

I need only look back to the last game I really tried to be competitive with, Rise of Nations. Night after night I would take on friends and forum goers, tightening my game, working to identify the best moments to move through the ages, learning which Wonders of the World best fit my strategies. I was never great, but I felt good about my play, until of course I actually came into contact with someone who truly understood the game.

Two, maybe three months or organized effort, and within a handful of games I discovered that I was no closer to being significantly skilled at RoN than I was to being voted People’s Sexiest Man of the Decade. After that, it was just so easy to stop playing altogether.

Maybe this is why I love games like Rock Band or World of Warcraft so much, because ultimately I know my only real opponent is myself, and I’ve totally got myself pegged as a chump. In all seriousness, though, eventually getting through a song like Everlong or Won’t Get Fooled Again on Expert drums is a goal that can happen on my own timeframe and without the intimidation of having someone periodically take the drumsticks from me halfway through the song so they can show me how a real man does it.

I don’t think I’m alone on this. I know games are trying harder to make sure that people are matched up with evenly skilled players, and I am genuinely grateful. It’s fine to know that somewhere in the ether hyper-brained proto-men are playing at the level of Gods, just so long as I don’t have to sit down across from them and play catch the deadly laser until my very soul, in a fit of embarrassed disappointment, catches a bus for the greener pastures of someone who isn’t a complete tool.

And, that should be the end of it, except that in the wake of my catastrophic defeat to Tkyl, I went back to my home field of the Practice League, and sent a call for challengers out into the night. In the battle to follow I happily unleashed an army of Protoss charged with the kind of primal fury that really can only be tapped in the wake of utter humiliation, and swept through my foe like a neutron star boulder through a planet made of Cappuccino foam. And, enlightened as I was by my victory, I realized maybe all that stuff about the intimidation of the achievement gap and the sanctity of engaging the self as the ultimate opponent is all just baloney.

Maybe I just really like winning more than losing. There's a life lesson for ya.

Comments

The question is whether SC2 can continue pulling new, less experienced players in to give other new, less experienced players someone to have a match against. Otherwise you get into a situation where six months after release, EVERYONE playing online, regardless of ranking, is so far above a given new player that they have no one to compete against.

The challenge mode (or whatever it's called) seems like it'll help, since most previous games of this type had NOTHING in any of the single-player modes that would help prepare a new player for what a human-vs.-human match is like. It'll have to be an actually fun mode to play as well as "educational," though. I have no patience for a game in which I must spend dozens of hours in not-fun honing my skills before I can be even slightly competitive and start having fun. No offense to those who like those sorts of games, of course, but it's just not my thing. The best games manage to make their training modes so fun that you don't even notice that you're "training." You're just playing the game, and your skill level improves naturally.

I haven't futzed around in the SC2 beta to know how well Blizzard succeeded in this case: it'll have to wait until I can afford a new computer, because my current one is just barely up to the task of running Torchlight, let alone anything modern.

I can certainly relate. Since I'm not in the beta, i wonder if i will even try. If the single player aspect of the game is compelling enough, maybe I'll pick it up on some sell. The thought of playing a game where even the people that I might remotely have a chance to beat already have a two to three month head start on me is a BIG turn off.

Gods, I remember Rise of Nations. I was playing against three of my real-life friends, but I was way better than they were, even though they didn't really know it yet. Since we were all on the phone, I could hear them as they went to war against each other and talked sh*t about their fights.

I was sitting in my sandbox, just seeing how fast I could level without really going any further than my walls. One of my buddies found me not too much later with the, 'holy sh*t he's got concrete walls and machine guns." His archers attacked anyway and I sent my "Iron dragons dropping their suns" upon my enemies who could only watch in horror as their civilizations were wiped bare and their navies sunk by mysterious giant squid and white whales they never had a shot at.

Might have been the most fun I ever had, in fact, that we all had. Certainly made for a good story.

It was like trying to light a campfire by hurling the sun at it.

I don't have much to add that hasn't already been given voice, except to say that I love this analogy.

This is why I avoid 1v1 games. I enjoy competitive team games, though. You can share your loss or victory with another person, and that always makes things better. That said, I thoroughly enjoy watching high end 1v1 games, even if my favorite player loses. (big fan of SC) Certain games take some investment to get into, and competitive games aren't the only types. 4X games can often be more intimidating than some competitive games to me.

As someone whose SC2 Beta experience involves a very high percentage of spanking (complete with lovely smack talk too) in the Copper league, I think the only way to enjoy this genre is to adjust the expectations.

Multiplayer games like this are set up fundamentally different to single player games. In most modern single player games, it is generally assumed that the player will win; the questions are ariound how quickly, what difficulty setting, what achievements, etc. In a game like SC2, even if Blizzard do their matchmaking perfectly, you will lose approximately 50% of the time, and in order to get to that steady state, there need to be some crushing defeats along the way.

Pikey26 wrote:

The Battle.net ranking system is pretty darned good about pitting you against people that are surprisingly as bad as you are.

Not based on my experience with several dozen games in the copper leagues. I won maybe one in four games. Not fun.

I'm hoping that when the game is released it will be wildly successful and there will be thousands of nostalgic RTS players like myself who have become equally decrepit over the years. Playing the beta left me much less interested in buying the game, though, at least until there is a more substantial single player experience.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Maybe I just really like winning more than losing. There's a life lesson for ya.

At the heart of it, whatever else I say, this is why I don't play games with other people.

My sentiments exactly.

Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But people who never win and never quit are called idiots.

For my part, I would have relished losing to a Platinum player like Tkyl. For me, part of the fun is in watching the replay and seeing the masterful command of units by players who are so above my skill level that I'm not even a challenge.

Heck, most of the time, I learn something new. This is how I slowly glommed onto the fact that in South Korea, middling level SC players don't even have build orders - they just picture the unit they want and they automatically know how to command their base and resource-gatherers to make it happen.

I wonder how much more accessible Starcraft would be if you had a "governor" who simply macro'ed everything for you, depending on the units you want on the field.

I'm very much in the same boat. Well, I do fine in turn-based strategy, it seems, and I've been on highly competitive Delta Force teams (top 3, even). But besides those, I've only had one game where I was unnaturally skilled in my youth. The kind of skilled that goes 20, 30, 40 minutes on one quarter in the arcade.

I was a Disks of Tron master. And the only real reaction I got was from other people in the GU cafeteria area who could not get a quick game in between classes because I was hogging the damn stand-up cabinet.

(See, even when you *find* the game you're good at, it may not be, you know, one that everyone really *cares* about. Glory is fleeting.)

Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But people who never win and never quit are called victims.

FTFY.

Those kinds of game may be a shattered blow to your ego, until you play cooperatively. 2v1 is hardly good odds, so having that extra person there makes the difference and makes the other person feel good.

I have to imagine that this is how non-gamers feel when they play almost anything.

I'm also a solitary gamer, in part because I love the epic sweep of Civ 4, Europa Universalis 3, and other games that -in my opinion- don't really lend themselves to multiplayer. Though I'd be lying if I said that the achievement gap wasn't also a factor.

Great article.

I laughed a bit with that piece. Good stuff!

I myself don't play much online. Mostly because I don't have that much time, but this inevitably hurts my skills in relation to those of the players who basically live online. I don't mind losing that much so long as I can learn from the experience. With some players, their skills are so far above mine that I can't learn anything when a match is over in a flash.

An analogous situation for me is with my training. I trained MMA and fought at amateur level for a few years. Now I'm doing strictly BJJ and the experience is completely different. In MMA the game is very open in the sense that I can hit somebody on the floor and use wrestling to outmaneuver them. In BJJ some wrestling comes into play but I can't hit anybody. It's often many months before a white belt - even one with experience in grappling - can submit anyone in the next level. This means months of frustration for the impatient. Thankfully, I balance this out by being stoic about it - philosophical even! - and appreciating the fact that at least I'm not getting hit on the head and won't be impersonating Muhammad Ali later in life.

Someday, maybe, I'll try my hand at competitive online Street Fighter 4... but not soon...

This rings true to me as far as the desire to be casual but it also hits home with the competitive. I have for quite some time preferred to be casual with my games. The "yeah I'm not that good, i play on easy, I'm playing for the story and the experience." But I recently (January) started playing League of Legends. LoL has a decent match making system but it also has a steep learning curve. I was determined to dig in and make something of it. I had not committed to practice something like this since high-school and Dr. Mario. I tried to get in an average of 4 games a week or more. I would not say I am top tier or anything but there are players what are quite a bit worse then I am.

Because I have been enjoying relatively good games in LoL I have been afraid to start playing SC2. I didn't want to go back to being a "noob" where I get myself all worked up because I can't win a game consistently. I signed up for the GWJ tournament to force myself to play and be humiliated and hopefuly get enough game time that I don't lose all the time.

Once I started playing I didn't lose all of my league SC2 games I have won most of the games I have played that battle.net setup but have lost all of the games I have tried on my own with goodjers and friends which I think is a bit of a testament to Blizzards match making for new players. That being said I have played a few placement matches and been through 2 resets worth of never getting to a league.

I also look forward to the Losers half of the gwj tournament.

One of the great things about SC and supposedly the future SC2 is that you don't have to enjoy it playing competitive multiplayer one on one or two on two. You can have a community 8v8 FFA where you all know who the monster is and you can all more or less gang up on him to see how many people he can take simultaneously.

You can set up a NoRush map, or a 3 on 1 map, an all Islands map - you name it, you can make the map. Heck, you can make a map where all you and your friend do is defend against an ever escalating series amount of enemy attacks - like Horde mode, only the AI is Zerg waves and you're both Terran.

Tkyl wrote:

Very nice article, Sean. I was scared going into the match that I would ruin any desire you had to play the game. I'm glad that playing me gave you a new found enthusiasm about the game.

Bullion Cube wrote:

However, I just heard some advice from Day[9]'s starcraft show that might get me over the hump. He recommended playing each game to learn something, rather than to win. If your goal during a game is to improve how you manage your resources, or to test out a new unit mix, then even if you lose in 10 minutes you can walk away thinking you've accomplished something. That's a philosophy I can have fun with...I think =)

I can't express how true this is. Something as simple as having a plan on what I'm going to focus on has dramatically help me. I went from being a silver player to a platinum in a matter of about 2 months.

This philosophy works for me in any competitive game. Its why i'm usually ready for more when faced up against a superior team in a FPS or any game i play. I want another chance to do better than the time before.

brokenclavicle wrote:

Someday, maybe, I'll try my hand at competitive online Street Fighter 4... but not soon...

Sadly, I have been trying SF4 online lately. My devastation has been complete. I can practice for an hour in the training room, trying to memorize each move, how to perform ultra combos, but once online? Forget it all and just button mash in a teeth grinding panic before YOU LOSE whisks onto the screen.

I want to be better at the game, but like many people here, I know I won't realistically put in the time. Too many games await, and life is just too short. But one win? Fireworks over Endor.

KidDork wrote:
brokenclavicle wrote:

Someday, maybe, I'll try my hand at competitive online Street Fighter 4... but not soon...

Sadly, I have been trying SF4 online lately. My devastation has been complete. I can practice for an hour in the training room, trying to memorize each move, how to perform ultra combos, but once online? Forget it all and just button mash in a teeth grinding panic before YOU LOSE whisks onto the screen.

So true for my SC2 experience. Had a pretty good player tell me 'how to play' early on, giving me build orders, small things to remember etc. It certainly helped, but I still forget or screw up half of it when the tiniest amount of pressure is thrown at me from the opponent.

AnimeJ wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Elysium, sounds like my 2 matches against Gunner.

Let's have a tourney for people who have never won a Starcraft 2 match against a human opponent.

I am so totally down for that. This afternoon is a case in point; I backdoored a guy with a pair of Void thingys. Then got owned by his superior macro. Wiped his entire main base and everything but still lost. Wish I had a replay, but I had to go take care of kids and stuff. Really, I promise.

The game automagically stores replays of recent games. So you *do* have the replay.

Busted!

Thin_J wrote:
AnimeJ wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Elysium, sounds like my 2 matches against Gunner.

Let's have a tourney for people who have never won a Starcraft 2 match against a human opponent.

I am so totally down for that. This afternoon is a case in point; I backdoored a guy with a pair of Void thingys. Then got owned by his superior macro. Wiped his entire main base and everything but still lost. Wish I had a replay, but I had to go take care of kids and stuff. Really, I promise.

The game automagically stores replays of recent games. So you *do* have the replay. :P

Not is some weird bug on your system gave you a bad sector at that specific point. That right AnimeJ? That would be a really sad coincidence.

This is why I avoid online multiplayer.
Despite this, I already pre-ordered Blur for the PC.
I plan on devoting quite a lot of time to that game.
I'm sure I'll regret typing this eight days from now when it's released, but games with vehicular combat are to me what Halo is to a foul-mouthed 13-year-old. We 'pwn' them.

Good to know I'm not alone.
I avoid some games like the plague if I find out that 30% or more of the achievements are multiplayer - odds are, I will never get them. I like gaming, but don't have the time to get good enough to win against other people. Heck, I didn't pick my forum signature at random...

Elysium wrote:
Where's Wordy when you need him?

Likely cursing my name for yet again subverting the very rules about editing that I, myself, put in place.

I'm sorry, do we know each other?

Ohhhhh. Don't be that way.

Just leave the money on the dresser.

In other news, Jamthulhu is from my original home town. This may require stalking.

Ha. You can stalk me all you want, as long as you promise to annoy the heck out of my p.i.t.a. neighbors while doing so!

I spent a good 14 years annoying the heck out of people in that town. Then I got to annoy Barrington for 4 years before college.

The kids in Barrington asked if I could sell them drugs and teach them to skate.

Dude, this is SO me as well. I love games and I love playing them... and honestly I am not *bad* at most of them. But even the mid-level players in any given game are so much more dedicated than I am that trying to square off against them is completely pointless. I won't take the time to memorize the map or learn every trick of trade just to score a win.

I recently pre-bought Heroes of Newerth because I liked the game concept so much... but when I jumped in trying to play "unranked" games to learn... even in those I was ridiculed by players who had been playing DoTA since apparently the days when XMS memory configuration boot disks were still needed. I quit after like 5 attempts, 'cause they are mean. My ego cannot take it! So I paid $30 for a game I am pretty sure I will never play in a live state.

$30 wasted on HoN doesn't matter though... I will still dip my toes in from time to time while sticking to my gaming habits... now and then I am bound to find a 6 year old whose dad is showing him the ropes and be able to stomp that little preschooler into the ground and renew my frail psyche for another few months.